The BJP on Wednesday went back over four decades to claim that Sonia Gandhi had been illegally added to the voters' list a year before she became an Indian citizen, betraying desperation to counter the Rahul Gandhi-led concerted Opposition attack for “colluding” with the poll panel to commit “vote chori (theft)”.
BJP social media head Amit Malviya posted on X a purported photocopy of the extract from the electoral rolls of 1980 that he claimed “indicates that Ms Sonia was a voter, when she did not yet acquire the citizenship of Bharat”.
“Sonia Gandhi’s tryst with India’s voters’ list is riddled with glaring violations of electoral law. This perhaps explains Rahul Gandhi’s fondness for regularising ineligible and illegal voters, and his opposition to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR),” Malviya added.
He claimed that Sonia, who married Rajiv Gandhi in 1968, was added during a revision of the voters’ list ahead of the 1980 Lok Sabha elections.
“The entry was a clear violation of the law, which requires a person to be an Indian citizen to be registered as a voter. Following an outcry in 1982, her name was deleted from the list — only to reappear in 1983,” the BJP leader said in the long post.
Malviya claimed that Sonia’s name was brought back to the voters’ list in 1983 after she secured Indian citizenship, which too was illegal. He claimed that the cut-off date was January 1, but Sonia became a citizen in April. “If this isn’t blatant electoral malpractice, what is?” Malviya asked, claiming that Sonia was granted Indian citizenship only on April 30, 1983.
BJP MP and former Union minister Anurag Thakur was fielded at the party headquarters to allege that large numbers of fake Muslim voters had been added to the rolls in the constituencies of key Opposition leaders. He pointed to Rahul Gandhi's Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s Wayanad, Abhishek Banerjee’s Diamond Harbour and Akhilesh Yadav’s Kannauj.
The Congress sought to turn the tables on Thakur. “Why is he diverting the issue? He presented some data today. Those were data from Wayanad and Kannauj. He says there are fake votes there, too. So he has proven what we have said. Anurag Thakur and the BJP are raising the same question on the EC that we have raised,” Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera told reporters.
Khera wondered how the BJP leader had got the electoral roll data so quickly. “It took us four-six months to bring forward the data of one Assembly constituency. They have brought out the data of two parliamentary constituencies. How did they get it?” the Congress leader asked, alleging collusion between the BJP and the EC.
“This proves that they have an understanding with the EC. When they have the electronic voter list with them, we demand that they make public the electronic voter list for Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s constituency,” Khera said.
Thakur accused Rahul of resorting to “shoot and scoot” and said the claims made by him were baseless. “Why isn’t Rahul filing a complaint under oath if his claims are true? Why hasn’t the Congress filed a single election petition so far?” the BJP leader asked, defending the EC’s drive to “cleanse the voters’ list by removing infiltrators”.
“In 2005, Mamata Banerjee had created a scene in the Lok Sabha to allege that Bangladeshi infiltrators had been made voters in Bengal. Today, when the EC is trying to remove the infiltrators, Mamata Didi is opposing,” Thakur said, accusing Trinamool and other Opposition parties of protecting their “special vote bank”.